Sustainability is the most influential environmental idea
of the last thirty years. Yet, what sustainability is, what it looks like, is
hard to define. One can read through all 50 pages of “The Future We Want,” the
outcome document from last summer’s Rio+20 conference, and still not know what,
exactly, the term means. I suggest that we can more completely understand
sustainability if we recognize it is not only an idea or a policy goal, but
also a particular kind of environmental story: the pastoral utopia. And we can
understand what sustainability means in the age of climate change if we
recognize that this utopian vision has come into conflict with a competing
story: the environmental apocalypse.

The differences between sustainability and climate
change, utopia and apocalypse, are stark. Sustainability promises that
humanity—operating on scales from global civilization to local enclaves—can
achieve simultaneous economic development, environmental protection, and social
equity, a kind of holistic harmony that requires hard labor but no sacrifice.
Climate change, in contrast, reveals that existing patterns of economic
development have led to massive environmental disruption and potentially gross
inequities that fundamentally threaten the world as we know it. Sustainability
focuses on humanity’s technical ingenuity and imaginative potential. Climate
change focuses on crisis and catastrophe. Sustainability promises we can
thrive. Climate change demands we figure out how we can survive. Sustainability
is a comedy, showing us how despite and because of our foibles we can overcome
serious obstacles to find a new, happy equilibrium. Climate change is an epic
drama, pitching forces of good against evil, creation versus destruction, and
calling on heroes to aid in the fight.

Accepting, as I do, that climate change poses a real
crisis, the question arises: How does sustainability figure into contemporary
environmental discourse? Here, I propose three possible answers:

Sustainability is Bad: Sustainability emerged as an
inclusionary, reform-oriented storyline, promoted by and within the context of
institutional actors like the United Nations Environment Program, the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, the
environmental sciences community, and the highly professionalized environmental
non-government organizations. Serious problems have emerged from these origins.
Most importantly, sustainability has failed (and was designed to fail) to
compel the radical transformation at the core of the countercultural social
movement that invented modern environmental politics. Rather than inspire
changes in the way we live necessary to actually redress the environmental
crisis, the sustainability story brackets big-ticket items like capitalism and consumerism,
reifies existing actors and hierarchies, and affirms basic patterns of social
organization, production, and consumption. In short, it is a deceptive story
that perpetuates existing power dynamics that are in many respects the causes
of climate change.

Sustainability is Mostly Harmless: Sustainability’s
utopian vision has had little impact on actual decision making, yet nonetheless
represents a maturation of environmental discourse, rather than a selling-out
of environmentalist ideals. Perhaps it over-relies on the capacity of markets
and market actors to find solutions to problems made by the demands of markets
and market actors, and perhaps it has become something of a placebo, a green
Band-Aid on a life-threatening wound, but it has the benefit of providing a
powerful ideal and an aspirational goal that, if honestly adhered to and
pursued, could substantially improve our world. Sustainability has always
sought to re-frame humanity’s role, placing the reconciliation of environmental
management and economic growth at the center of our own story. Arguably, there
is sufficient evidence that with enough technological savvy, political
commitment, and hard work a sustainable ecology and economy can coexist.

Sustainability is Good: Sustainability is a vital and
necessary story for achieving real improvements in our overall environmental
and social health. However, it has become subsidiary to the twin challenges of
climate change mitigation and adaptation, and now must complement these less
inspiring storylines—mitigation is irredeemably technocratic, adaptation is
potentially paralyzing—by offering a positive vision for environmental change.
Sustainability’s narrative and rhetorical force should be harnessed not to
promote sustainable development but to motivate us to innovate for greater
energy efficiency, to transition to a renewable energy economy, to reduce and
alter consumption habits, to move roads and fortify infrastructure to account
for sea-level rise, to translocate populations of humans, animals and plants
from places that are no longer habitable, or even existent, and to take on the
myriad other demands of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Can the conflicting stories of sustainability and climate
change be reconciled, without surrendering something essential about one or the
other? Can we have both comedy and epic drama at the same time? And how do
these stories interact with the law? Neither sustainability law nor climate
change law is, at this point, well-settled; both are in relatively early stages
of development. As legislation, regulation, and litigation in these areas
proceed, it will be worth keeping tabs on the narrative pitch.